In law enforcement, the stress of emergency-response scenarios can impede understanding of spoken messages and interpretation of other's emotional states. This can lead to potentially incorrect judgments with life or death consequences that can resonate throughout families, communities, and societies for years. To this end, robots have long provided safer alternatives to direct human interaction in hazardous scenarios, such as explosive ordinance disposal and surveillance. However, these are relatively special cases: A much greater share of police work relies on interpersonal communication where the development of mutual relationships, empathy, and trust are required. Unfortunately, modern remote technologies impede the necessary development of these trust relationships, reduce situational awareness, and disrupt communication between citizens and law enforcement. To protect the welfare of both officers and civilians in their mutual encounters, a transdisciplinary team of investigators are developing a prototype teleoperated social robot for use in hazardous operations involving public safety. The aim is to minimize dangers while increasing the quality of remote interpersonal communication, enabled by multimodal "presence" and communication through social robotics.
Activities performed during these early investigations will aim at developing stakeholder relations and performing iterative prototyping and design studies with local law enforcement training sites. The investigators will also address the research team composition, adding additional experts in the social, behavioral, technical, ethical, and legal domains. A central rationale of this research is that the use of force can be caused by misinformation, miscommunication, stress and time pressures in high-risk situations. It is expected that this initial research on a highly immersive, inexpensive, teleoperated social robots will generate knowledge on the risks, challenges, and requirements of human-robot partnerships and can facilitate transparent communication between law enforcement officers and the public in hazardous situations.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
